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Popular Lectures

The London Mathematical Society Popular Lectures present exciting topics in mathematics (and its applications) to a wide audience. Each year, the LMS Popular Lectures feature two lecturers, who have been chosen for their mathematical distinction and communication skills. The Society aims to present a wide range of mathematical topics in the lectures, which are suitable for all who have an interest in mathematics.

The Popular Lectures are a free annual event held during either June or July in London and repeated in late September at one other UK venue; for the past few years, this has been Birmingham.

2014 POPULAR LECTURES

For 2014, the Popular Lecturers will be Professor Kevin Buzzard of Imperial College London and Dr Julia Gog of the University of Cambridge.

The lectures will take place on:

Wednesday 9th July at the Institute of Education, London (7:00pm)

Wednesday 24th September at the The Bramall Building, Edgbaston Campus, University of Birmingham (6:30pm)

There are now no further tickets remaining for the lecture in Birmingham, though tickets for the London event are still available.

Many of our interests, our thoughts, and much of our work and home life is now being stored in digital format. Our mp3s, digital photos, our electronic calendars and organisers, the books we read and games we play: most of these things have been reduced to numbers. Numbers can store many kinds of information.

This has some strange consequences. For example, some numbers are copyrighted, and there are even some illegal prime numbers. But way before this digital revolution, mathematicians realised that numbers could encode all of mathematics (even the parts of it that aren't about numbers), and this has some even stranger consequences...

Dr Julia Gog (University of Cambridge)

Epidemics and viruses: the mathematics of disease

One may think applied maths is mainly used for solving problems in physics, but increasingly it is becoming an essential tool in biological sciences. Here, we will look at how mathematics has been applied to help understand and control infectious diseases, from the scale of a single virus particle through to a global influenza pandemic, and some mathematical challenges for the future.

If you wish to attend the Popular Lectures, please write to popular.lectures@lms.ac.uk or to Popular Lectures, London Mathematical Society, De Morgan House, 57-58 Russell Square, London, WC1B 4HS. A form for registration is available below. Please provide a postal address for tickets to be sent to.

The LMS publishes 13 peer-reviewed journals, 2 book series and a monthly newsletter. These world-class publications form an important element in the Society's delivery of its strategic activities in support of mathematics and the research community.